Real-time diagnostics during surgery and in vivo monitoring of chemotherapy-induced tissue changes in the neoadjuvant and adjuvant situation are two critical technologies in cancer treatments, which would enable individualized surgical treatment. Modalities which can offer information related to real-time tumour detection during surgery include the “iKnife” (intelligent Knife) (Balog et al., Science Translational Medicine, vol. 5, no. 194, p. 194ra93, 2013), whose operation is based on rapid evaporative ionization mass spectroscopy (REIMS). Fluorescent bioelectricity reporter (FBR) has been used to monitor a large number of cells simultaneously in vivo, and to track bioelectric gradients over relatively long time periods (despite cell movements and divisions) at a subcellular resolution level (Adams and Levin, Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, vol. 2012, no. 4, p. 385, 2012; Chernet and Levin, Disease Models & Mechanisms, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 595.607, 2013). However, iKnife's wide clinical deployment calls for the building of detailed chemical spectrum databases while FBR has not been designed for clinical applications. Methods using electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) to differentiate between normal, pre-cancerous and cancerous tissues are known, for example the ZedScan technology from Zilico. Such methods exploit the different electrical resistivity of each specific tissue type based on its cellular structure. However, impedance measurement is an active measurement in that a current must be sent into the tissue or organ in order to detect the resulting voltage difference.
There is therefore a need in the art for an improved method of determining, during surgery, whether a tissue is cancerous or not.